Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Science fiction and Kant both helped me see the world as radically 'other.' Science fiction: I've always been a fan. Kant: I wasn't a fan until I read Roberts (2015). Through reading Kant (1989), I'm acquiring a set of tools for seeing the world as radically other, heightened by my concurrent reading of science fiction. Two questions emerge: 1. Is the realisation that the world is nothing other than one's a priori projection onto it a traumatising experience? 2. Is science fiction inherently about trauma?

Without having read The Thing Itself, these questions would not have emerged. At the same time as I've been cultivating a kind of cognitive estrangement through my building relationship with TTI, another question has flowered beneath the first two, and this is: is the estrangement/utopia SF offers a 'way in' to examination of subaltern experiences of contact and colonisation? In other words, can SF be used as a tool for analysing coloniser/colonised, settler/disspossessed, native/alien dichotomies? At the inflection point of each of these dualities lies a trauma, and science fiction, I would argue, offers a set of narrative strategies and tropes for their deconstruction. Le Guin (2002) is a key reading in this regard, offering a literal counter-map of two worlds in juxtaposition, each seeing the other as its own moon; each seeing themselves, in anthropological discourse, as 'the people.' (It is my unevidenced contention that Massey's For Space is channelling The Dispossessed in its political focus on anarchism as an ideal political form, and in its emphasis on heterogeneity as an inherent good).

I'm slowly circling around to what all this might mean for counter-mapping, contrapuntality, and indigeneity. I'm proposing to devote a section to the following trialectical conjunction:

Indigeneity -- Trauma -- Science Fiction

I'll start with the right hand connection (Trauma -- Science Fiction). There are certainly traumatic episodes in TTI, to the extent that it drives the plot of the book. Another obvious one would be Slaughterhouse Five, in which Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time as a result of his traumatic experience of the Dresden bombings (something Vonnegut himself experienced) (Vees-Gulani, 2003). Everything about The Dispossessed is somehow traumatic, from Shevek's (double) forced displacement, to the existence of the two opposite worlds in the first place, and the origin of that binary construction. Other examples will undoubtedly abound (this is an excuse for me to read a lot more science fiction!).

Links between indigeneity and trauma are not hard to find. The two 'set-pieces' I'm examining in my forthcoming Contrapuntal Cartographies are the northern highlands of Scotland; and indigenous/northern Canada. Evidence of trauma comes from readings of literature, from Scott (Waverley, Rob Roy, Heart of Midlothian, Redgauntlet) and Boyden (Three Day Road, Through Black Spruce, The Orenda); I'm adding to this list indigenous/Scottish science fiction (Taylor, 2016; Dillon, 2012; Wilson and Williamson, 2005). These will be constructed as counter-mappings.

The last piece of the puzzle then is: is science fiction counter-mapping and, if so, what are its specific resonances for indigenous and subaltern subjectivities and resistances? What kinds of mappings flow from the extraordinary nova science fiction produces? In what ways are these inherently 'indigenous', or relevant to subaltern experiences of cognitive dissonance, displacement, and erasure? To what extent is it OK to say that we (white British people) understand the indigenous experience because we've read War of the Worlds, and were traumatised by it (albeit metaphorically)? Would it really be like that? Was it?

Is it ok to posit Kant's categories of space and time (separately) as a priori structuring of the world, subjectivity, and knowledge? Does the fact that I am, after all, a white Euro-Canadian man make a difference, or offer an excuse, a way out? Or was Kant just right? I can't help but think Kant was significantly correct, and got it right so to speak, to the extent that philosophers after him only refined or revised the findings of the critique (at least up to Foucault). At the same time, science fiction, post-modern genre par excellence (Jameson, 2005), lets us see the world including practically all of its revolutions at once (as in a kind of Borgesian Aleph, once we get into it), and the world as radically other admits of other ways of seeing beyond those circumscribed by Kant (1989).

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Lecturer in Human and Environmental Geography, Director: Geospatial and Visual Methods Lab (GVML), Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London, author of Maps and Memes (MQUP, @scholarmqup)